JOE HERMITT/The Patriot-NewsPenn State coach Joe Paterno stands with his wife Sue during a ceremony on field following the 35-21 win over Northwestern at Beaver Stadium giving Paterno the 400th victory of his career.

I don't know about you. But when I'm 84, I won't be standing outside in the cold anywhere for four hours. I won't want to do that. So, I won't.

That includes golf. If I take up golf, it'll be seven holes at a time and then straight to the clubhouse to play pinochle, like John Chaney does it. He's 78. I think he has the right idea.

But this Paterno character. Man, I don't know. Why would you want to do this to yourself?

The old man officially set his sights on another season on Tuesday. Not that his gaze ever stopped at the horizon. He was just acknowledging what to him is the obvious. Why would he do anything else?

I don't understand it. But then, I'd guess 99 percent of us aren't built like Joe Paterno. And I don't mean his physique or his physiology. I mean his wiring. This man is a freak of nature. He wants to keep going and going until he finally just drops. Maybe that's noble but it exhausts me just thinking about it.

We all sort of snickered when the young female USA Today reporter who opened Paterno's Q&A at the Chicago Big Ten meetings in early August bluntly fired the first question something like this:

“I've been watching you for a long time and I think you're going to coach until the day you die. What do you think about that?”

Even slurred and laborious of speech, Paterno managed a comeback:

“What is that, wishful thinking?”

Well, all of us middle-aged sportswriter guys sort of rolled our eyes at the youthful questioner because of her wording and incongruously chipper cadence. But, know what? She nailed the entire situation. That's really all there is to it.

He's going to coach until the day he dies. Hey, if that's what makes him happy.

I like having Paterno around purely from a selfish standpoint and I'm pretty sure most of us in the media feel that way. As a reporter, his responses even at his advanced age (he turns 84 in four weeks) reflect a depth of perspective only a man with his experience can offer.

Plus, he's still pretty damned funny at times as he was Friday night at the Gaylord National Harbor hotel on the south end of the outer beltway around D.C.

It was a spectacular big-time venue, a pretend city with shops and stores and the hotel with the 12-story atrium looking out over the harbor, all of it thrown up at once by a massive development corporation. It's the kind of place that makes you feel like a big event is happening.

In one of the conference rooms about 10 or 12 of us sat listening to the old man tell stories as we often do on Friday nights before road games. He has so many. This was one I had not heard before in 20 years of attending these things. It was about the charismatic former Marquette basketball coach Al McGuire, winner of the 1977 national championship.

As an aside after failing to snag one of his former assistants to succeed Johnny Bach as Penn State's basketball coach, Paterno made a passing offer to his fellow New Yorker McGuire. “You should come here and coach this team,” Paterno cajoled. And the punchline was McGuire's response. Paterno leaned back in his chair and began grinning before he even delivered it in his best McGuire impression:

“Ahh, Joey. State College, Pennsylvania, ain't big enough for the both of us.”

We all howled. Great story, great storyteller. Paterno holding court. He loves it.

Which is all great. But many of you couldn't care less about how Paterno keeps the pliable local media in check with funny stories. You would like to see more wins. Specifically, you want to see wins that make you proud to be in the Blue and White club you joined long ago. Wins over Iowa and Ohio State and maybe an upset of an Alabama thrown in on occasion. Something besides conquests of Indiana and Minnesota and Youngstown State.

I've heard from a substantial segment of devoted Penn State fans – and Paterno fans – who wish he would retire. They believe he's too old to do the job. They usually cite the fact that he almost never participates in recruiting junkets anymore – the lifeblood of any program.

So a few minutes after he'd confirmed on Tuesday that he intends to coach the 2011 season, I hopped on the Big Ten teleconference and asked him in exactly that way. Isn't he physically too old to do this job anymore? If not, why doesn't he ever make recruiting trips?

Paterno's response centered around his fame and how he says it cramps everything he tries to do on the road, that the region is full of PSU alums who want to see him and touch him and have their photos taken with him. And this is what inhibits his ability to actually do what needs to be done:

“I'm not sure how to answer that. I'm trying to do what's best for the program,” he began.

“The business about recruiting is a difficult one for me at this stage. Not in the sense that I don't want to do it physically or what have you. But if I go into a town these days, it's a run on me.

“Everybody who's teaching in the school who's a Penn State graduate, or in business, there's always a lot of people coming around and a lot of hoopla. ...

“In the old days when I could just get in the car with an assistant coach and we could hop all over the place and get into four or five schools in a day, I could get it done. Nowadays, it's tough for me to get out of a school. Because there's so many demands on me when I get there. If I can get into three schools in a day, that's very unusual. Most of the time, it's just one or two.”

Well, actually, in the last two years it just hasn't happened, period. But Paterno insisted it's had nothing to do with physical limitations of an octogenarian:

“We recruit where there are a lot of Penn Staters living. And in a case where they're teaching in a school or doing business in a town, in a lot of cases it gives the guy a chance to get his picture taken with the coach at Penn State and that gives him some credibility. You know, there's a lot of things involved in it public-relations-wise. That's one of the reasons it's been much more difficult for me to get around.”

Got all that? Are you buying it? Me neither.

I think Paterno likes being the figurehead. He likes being the boss. He likes even some of the stuff he says he can do without because it's part and parcel of being The Head Coach. And he can still manage to pace the sideline for four hours on Saturday afternoon which keeps up appearances. God bless him for even managing that in his 80s.

But doing the dirty work it takes to feed a monster like Penn State football just isn't something he wants to fool with anymore. So, it falls on his assistants.

Is that fair? Hey, it's not my problem. Glad of that.

It's all like some 1960s corporation with an aged CEO at the top who's still too powerful to topple. All the mad men below him fade the heat.

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